The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,101

but that doesn’t mean I never did.”

He’d not had any reason to believe in himself. He’d not excelled in his schooling. He’d not met any of the expectations his father had of him. And now, the one thing his mother could and would find pride in? Well, it had all been conceived for reasons that hadn’t been motivated for the reasons she thought. Unlike Emma, who had set out to create something, he’d simply followed along in a bid to woo her.

His mother searched her gaze over his face, her brow furrowing. “What is it?”

Of course, because a mother saw, and a mother always knew.

Charles shook his head. “You’re making more of . . . this than it is.”

“I don’t believe I am.”

“I only did it because Emma called me out,” he exclaimed, owning the real motivation behind what he’d done. “She insisted that I didn’t take anything seriously.” And she’d not been wrong. “And I . . .”

“And you set out to prove you were capable?”

Rubbing four fingers across his forehead, Charles nodded. “Yes. That is why.” That was what it had begun as, anyway. Heat pricked his skin at the attention his mother trained on him.

The silence his admission ushered in left him hollow; it heightened his sense of shame. “Do you know what I think, Charles?”

He gave his head a tight, curt shake.

“I believe she called you out because she saw there was more to you than the world saw. She encouraged you to do things she knew you could do.”

Charles chuckled, the sound wry to his own ears. Seating himself at the side of the billiards table, he scrubbed a hand over his face. “And you also believed we would have been happily married.” He thought of the shock of betrayal in Emma’s eyes as she’d fled last night, and he closed his eyes tightly.

“I did.” Her eyes twinkled. “And I still do.”

His lips curled up at the corner in a wry twist. “She doesn’t even like me.”

But what about that moment in the bookshop . . . on Regent Street, or at Lady Rutland’s? When it was so easy and so very natural to be with her? And speak to her about topics you both care about and share an interest in . . .

His mother rested her hand on his, pulling Charles back from those wishful and, worse, delusional musings. “When you were children, Emma lit up the moment you entered a room. She adored you . . .”

Until she hadn’t.

Until he’d taken all his resentment out on the person who’d been least deserving of it. The very person whom he’d shared a bond with. Or what would have been a bond, had he not gone and severed the ties of it with his meanness and disinterest. Charles stared blankly at the opposite wall. What was worse . . .

“She doesn’t trust me.” He released a curse. “Nor should she.” Because of his role in concealing Camille’s fall, and because of whom he’d allowed himself to become thereafter.

His mother’s features buckled, and she touched a hand to her mouth. “We didn’t think enough about you, Charles,” she said on an aching whisper. “We didn’t think about how what your father . . . and I asked of you should affect you and Emma, and that was wrong.”

Yes, it had been wrong. But it would have been more wrong had Charles not done everything in his power to protect his sister from the suffering and fallout which would have come following her indiscretion.

As it was, he’d not called out the bounder who’d deceived her, the man with false intentions to elope with her.

“It was my choice,” he said tiredly. Tired of it all. Tired of the deception. Tired of the sins of another man, who had left so many lives altered. And tired of being powerless to win the one woman he wished to. “And regardless of what you asked, I didn’t need to throw myself into that part as I did. And because of that . . . I don’t deserve her.” He spoke quietly, to himself. “I didn’t appreciate her when I had a chance of a future with her. I drank too much. I wagered often. I was not”—his cheeks went hot—“faithful.”

His mother gently cupped his cheeks. “Who you were yesterday, Charles, isn’t who you will forever be. And I know Emma. I trust in Emma. She will one day soon see that.”

Not when what she’d seen last evening had been rouge